"Using a Mac may certainly be a safer choice for a lot of people as despite being vulnerable they are not targeted. However this is not the same as Macs being secure, something Eric Schmidt erroneously advised recently. I may be able to browse impervious to malware on a Mac at the moment, however I personally would not be comfortable using a platform so easily compromised if someone had the motivation to do so. In this article I address just why OS X is so insecure including the technical shortcomings of OS X as well as Apples policies as a company that contribute to the situation."

I agree that once a user is convinced that the software he downloaded legitimately needs advanced security permissions, the efficiency of sandboxing - or any technological malware protection method, for that matter - fades away.

However, I don't think that the user would be lured into this on a shady website. Here's why.

Let's take a picture of random search results on a popular torrent website. It looks the same everywhere anyway.

Here we have lots of aggressive ads, one that pretends to be legit sites control but will open a page in a new tab in the upper right corner, one about girls in light clothing that "want to date you" (even though they know nothing about you), and one which I don't fully understand because it's in Swedish but am 99% sure it's about winning a lottery.

These ads are poorly done. Our user is not so dumb that he can't find out that this place is full of scam. Maybe he'll have to get burn once first, but he'll get it.

From this point, the user will get a very defensive behaviour towards ads and strangely one-sided attractive proposals. He'll focus on getting things done, not on ad tourism.

In this context, the "your computer is infected, but we have cure for cancer" scam won't harm him, because he's already cautious enough to notice its flaws.

Now, I *can* get that someone could get a trojan through a browser + OS exploit that makes it use true system dialogs. Or when the trojan's advertising is *alone* in the place and unexpected. But in a crowded and aggressive environment like torrent websites, users focus on getting things done as quickly as possible and don't look around, I think. Even a well-done fake dialog like http://sophosnews.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/fakeav.jpg would fail in this context.